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Hitachi-GE project honored for innovation in nuclear power generation

Bentley Systems Inc. said yesterday that a Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. project has won the 2014 Be Inspired Award for innovation in power generation.

The winning project, "Development of Decommissioning Engineering Platform Based on 3D Plant Model," was the result of the Japanese government’s decision to decommission all nuclear reactors that are more than 40 years old. By the 2040s, decommissioning will peak at more than 50 percent of Japan’s domestic plants.

The winners of the 2014 Be Inspired Awards were selected by nine independent panels of jurors, composed of distinguished industry experts. The awards honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users to improve and sustain the world’s infrastructure, recognizing outstanding and innovative project achievements in infrastructure design, construction and operations.

The objective of the Hitachi-GE project was to accurately calculate the amount of waste materials that had to be managed as radioactive substances for each nuclear power plant. With the help of MicroStation’s 3D modeling capabilities and i-models, the joint venture assessed the radiation dose for workers, the number of man-hours and amount of radioactive waste materials generated from the demolition, demolition procedure data and residual radioactivity.

Bentley Industry Marketing Director Anne-Marie Walters said the jurors selected this project for its innovative approach to an extreme engineering challenge -- an approach that fully leveraged the ability of i-models to integrate geometric volumes with complex data.

“The jurors commended the Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy team for carefully and methodically thinking through the disassembly process of nuclear plants and changing the approach from the traditional consideration of plant weight to plant volume,” Walters said. “This enabled the team to take into account the radiation dose rate from each part of the plant. The team was then able to develop a safe, rational and cost-effective approach to decommissioning Japan’s aging nuclear power plants.”